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Tuesday, November 19, 2013

The Social Construction of Hatred

The social construction of hatred toward the Jewish people by the Islamic world and the western-left should, at this point in human history, be axiomatic.

In the Arab-Muslim world they scream bloody murder on a daily basis that the Jewish minority is evil and must be destroyed. Western "liberals" either do not care or believe that the Jews deserve whatever beating that we get for allegedly being mean to Palestinian-Arabs. Ayatollahs and imams throughout the Middle East shake their fists in the air and tell their people that the tiny Jewish minority are vile in the sight of Allah and that it is a spiritual blessing to murder Jews. In the mean time, western progressives tell one another that the Jews of the Middle East are racist, imperialistic, colonialist, apartheid, war-mongers and thereby justify an ancient Arab-Muslim culture of violence toward the Jewish people.

This, of course, is nothing new. What led to the various persecutions and pogroms and expulsions of the Jewish people throughout European and Arabic history was the defamation of the Jew. My father's side of the family was slaughtered in the town of Medzhybizh, in the western Ukraine during Operation Barbarossa in July of 1941, precisely because of the incessant defamation of Jewish people in western Europe. They were forced into road building, along with the Christian population of the small town, to aid the Nazi advance into the Soviet Union and when the roadways were completed they were made to dig ditches just outside of town at the point of a rifle. When the ditches were completed the estimated 3,000 Jews of Medzhybizh were lined up in those ditches and shot dead by the Einsatzgruppen, professional Jew murderers.

Since the end of World War II the primary sources of genocidal anti-Semitism have been the Arab-Muslim world and the United Nations, within which the Arab and Muslim governments have huge influence due to the simple fact of numbers. As anyone who follows the long Arab war against the Jews knows, the United Nations is an enemy of the Jewish people and of the Jewish State. The United Nations has 193 member states and yet an exceedingly disproportionate number of its resolutions represent hostility toward Israel despite the fact that Israel has a far better human rights record than does any other country throughout its entire region.

In the beginning of this year the United Nations compiled a report entitled,"Children in Israeli Military Detention," which claims that, "It is understood that in no other country are children systematically tried by juvenile military courts that, by definition, fall short of providing the necessary guarantees to ensure respect for their rights."

The UN also claims that "Ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system appears
to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized. This conclusion is based on the
repeated allegations about such treatment over the past 10 years and the volume,
consistency and persistence of these allegations."

These conclusions reflect another UN report from June of this year, addressed by scholar Phyllis Chesler in a Times of Israel piece entitled, UNICEF’s Blood Libel Against Israel, which suggests that Israel tortures Arab children.

Chesler writes:

UNICEF has not released a similar report which focuses on the systematic use of Palestinian children as human shields by Palestinian jihadists; on the increase in honor killings of Palestinian daughters by their Palestinian families on the West Bank and in Gaza; or on the sophisticated indoctrination of Palestinian children by Palestinian adults into becoming suicide killers.

In the more than fifty UNICEF reports on the “state of Palestine,” it blames Israel for whatever harm comes to Palestinian children. And, when UNICEF does look at the horrifying war raging in Syria, these reports do not register psychologically with a global community eager to believe that Israel is the worst country in the world.

Chesler clearly understands what most of us understand and that is the simple fact that when it comes to Israel the United Nations is simply not to be trusted. We all know that the UN spends far more time and energy kicking the hell out of the Jewish State than it does addressing the far worse human rights violations that we see throughout Africa and the rest of Asia. In fact, the main business of the UN seems to be ripping down the Jewish State of Israel and it does so out of Arab-Muslim Koranically-based loathing for Jews.

Thus, I do not believe for one minute that this UN report is either honest or fair. And even if I am wrong, and that Israel is as morally heinous as the report claims, how can any fair-minded person trust such claims when the Sudan and the Congo and China and Turkey - in its occupation of Cyprus - get a free pass?

And this brings me to my central point.

Why is Michael Lerner, of Tikkun Daily, publishing Jew Haters like David Harris-Gershon?

In a recent piece for both Daily Kos and Tikkun Daily, Harris-Gershon spreads hatred toward his fellow Jews by citing the first UN report above which simply cannot be trusted. Even if the UN report is accurate, which I highly doubt, given the fact of UN malice toward Israel why would this man cite it in a malicious manner that could very easily incite violence toward his own people? He must know that the UN is hostile to Israel and yet he uses a UN report as a club with which to beat the Jewish people and to create hatred toward them.

And that, finally, is the point.

Harris-Gershon writes:

While this report found the IDF's practice of awaking children at night, blindfolding them and escorting them, unaccompanied, to interrogation centers most troubling, it also highlighted Israeli soldiers' practice of binding children and holding them to be of concern.

The children who were cuffed and detained on Friday were, according to an Israeli military spokesperson, suspected of preparing to alight a tire, and that the children were detained to "prevent mayhem." However, witnesses say that Israeli troops' presence at the weekly protest is what sparked clashes, and that soldiers began rounding up children after stun grenades were thrown toward them.

He draws this conclusion from a report by the Palestinian-Arab Ma'an News Agency.
It might be that this report is accurate, but I have to wonder why Harris-Gershon gives such credence to a "news agency" that is absolutely hostile toward his own people and then uses a report from that "news agency" to cite a United Nations report that spreads the blood-libel against Jews?

The bottom line is that people like Michael Lerner and David Harris-Gershon are constructing hatred toward their fellow Jews and they do so, with hideous irony, in the name of social justice and human rights. The truth, of course, is that neither Lerner, nor Harris-Gershon, are the least bit interested in social justice. If they were they would also be interested in social justice for the Jewish people, but instead they spread hatred toward their own.

20 comments:

It gets 'better,' actually. I didn't see the original comment, but in another Tikkun thread, it seems to appear that this post was David's 'response' to the murder of Eden Atias. Look at the title, and the timing. Yet another 'blame the Jews firster'...

So, in other words, that Jewish kid got knifed in the neck and Harris-Gershon is telling the world why it's his own fault or the fault of his parents or the fault of the Jews, but not the fault of the actual perpetrator or the culture of hate that he comes out of.

As I tried to say there, at Tikkun, but the comment did not survive, what about the parents that let their young kids enter harm's way? No concern for the children at the hands of their elders that abuse them in violation of international law.

As to UN bias, it's theater, but some there can see through the performances.

I had a few comments go through, but this last one was zapped at the moment I clicked to publish it.

No big deal. I think the influence of such people is overrated and the times are changing.

What I find most fault with is not that they put forth people who demand to be heard as if their vitriol and discrimination they practice against Jews is a right, but that they seem wholly afraid to allow another side to be presented alongside.

Perhaps the juxtaposition will expose the ones that are unreasonable or ignorant.

Too many people, even among the activists, lack basic knowledge of history and the facts, yet seem to believe their knowledge is complete and that additional information must be rejected as tainted, particularly if it may support the demonized. It extends beyond this matter, but overall in politics.

The notion of solidarity, like the halo effect, contributes to the myopia, and makes the most ignorant susceptible to gross manipulation that feeds bias.

Of course, to intentionally use information to reinforce or incite discrimination against a group of people is insidious. So is using a discriminatory double standard of treatment that requires only one out of all to adhere to impossible norms of behavior while others, perhaps themselves, do not observe even minimal norms.

Bringing down Israel and Jews brings down the Western culture that many of these critics are a part of, and ultimately themselves, but they are too ignorant to see what is so obvious.

When faux Nazis like David H-G hate you you're on the right track. Whatever dysfunction he's working out in public, who really cares? They're just another flavor of Nazi it dresses like a Soviet and sounds like Hamas but it's the same old Nazi underneath.

“We [Israel] possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are 22 targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.” I consider it all hopeless at this point. . . Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.” - Martin van Creveld, Zionist Jew

"The blind enemies should see that the wish of these people is the death of America and Israel."

-- Ayatollah Janati

"With God’s help the time has come for the Zionist regime’s death sentence."

-- General Yahya Rahim Safavi

"Among the Jews there have always been those who killed God’s prophets and who opposed justice and righteousness. Historically, there are many accusations against the Jews. For example, it was said that they were the source for such deadly diseases as the plague and typhus. This is because the Jews are very filthy people. For a time people also said that they poisoned water wells belonging to Christians and thus killed them."

-- Mohammad-Ali Ramin

Text on banners and signs in Iran:

"Israel must be uprooted and wiped off history"

-- the inscription on a Shahab 3 missile on a military parade in Tehran, September 22, 2003 [photograph]

"Israel should be wiped off the face of the world"

-- Text on banner on Basij housing building, and on a bus at a military rally in Iran in November 2006 [photographs]

"The concept of the 'evil Jew' has made a well-disguised comeback: Criticizing Israel and Zionists, is now deemed a legitimate option to cursing Jews and Judaism. Not only is it open, socially acceptable and legal, but it can actually bring prosperity and popularity. This new form of anti-Semitism 2.0 is well-covered-up, harder to trace and poses a much deeper danger to the modern way of life of the civilized world than the earlier crude form of it, as it slowly and gradually works on delegitimizing Jews to the point where it eventually becomes acceptable to target Jews, first verbally, then physically -- all done in a cosmopolitan style where the anti-Semites are well-groomed speakers and headline writers in jackets and ties; and not just Arab, but American and European, from 'sanitized' news coverage of the most bloodthirsty radicals, to charges against Israel in which facts are distorted, selectively omitted or simply untrue, as in former President Jimmy Carter's book on Israel.

"Why would a Palestinian be writing this? The answer is simple: The Palestinians have been used as fuel for the new form of anti-Semitism; this has hurt the Palestinians and exposed them to unprecedented and purposely media-ignored abuse by Arab governments, including some of those who claim love for the Palestinians, yet in fact only bear hatred to Jews. This has resulted in Palestinian cries for justice, equality, freedom and even basic human rights being ignored while the world getting consumed with delegitimizing Israel from either ignorance or malice.

"Worse, just as the old form of anti-Semitism has proven itself a threat as poisonous to its supporters, as it was to the Jews, the new form of anti-Semitism 2.0 could prove itself the same -- all the more likely as we see the world tolerating Iran's nuclear ambitions not necessarily out of love for the Mullah's regime, but instead because of mental fixation against Israel.

"Such bias against Israel cannot be 'accidental' or merely 'unfortunate.' No other nation has received the amount of scrutinizing, criticism, coverage, demonization and delegitimization. In fact the question to be asked is not whether there is bias against Israel; but rather why there is bias against Israel ..."

Barack Obama on the so-called "Arab Spring" (May 19, 2011):

"There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat."

The "Arab Spring" was the brutal rise of political Islam in the Middle East and this is what Obama compares the Civil Rights Movement to?

The Fundamental Argument:

The progressive movement, and the activist base of the Democratic Party, creates and supports venues that demonize and defame the Jewish state, thereby also creating hatred toward the Jewish people.

Such venues include political journals, such as, but not limited to, Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, and the UK Guardian, numerous universities throughout the United States and Europe, various NGOs with an anti-Israel agenda, and the entire progressive-left movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction (BDS) the Jewish people of the state of Israel.

These venues and organizations do not generally criticize Israel, but dehumanize that country.

For this reason, among others, the progressive movement, and the activist base of the Democratic Party, undermines the well-being and safety of Jews around the world, sometimes resulting in violence toward us.

Therefore, as a matter of common sense and basic human decency, Jews should leave the progressive movement and the Democratic Party as we seek to build alternative political structures that are not home to toxic anti-Semitic anti-Zionists, who would see us robbed of self-determination and self-defense.

What You Can't Discuss:

This is a partial list of taboo topics within progressive-left venues around the Arab-Israel conflict. You cannot discuss this material because it undermines the "Palestinian narrative" of perpetual victimhood. This narrative is a club used by the Arab and Muslim enemies of Israel, along with their western progressive allies, to delegitimize that country in preparation for its eventual dissolution.

1) The centuries of Jewish dhimmitude under the boot of Islamic imperialism.

2) The recent construction of Palestinian identity, its connection to Soviet Cold War politics, and how this is an Arab people with a Roman name that refers to Greeks.

3) Arab and Palestinian Koranically-based racism as the fundamental source of the conflict.

4) The ways in which contemporary progressive anti-Zionism serves as a cloak for gross anti-Semitism.

5) The Palestinian theft and appropriation of Jewish history.

6) "Pallywood."

7) The historical connections between the Nazis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Palestinian national movement.

8) The perpetual refusal of the Palestinian-Arabs to accept a state for themselves in peace next to the Jewish one.

9) The progressive portrayal of terrorists as those fighting a righteous war of "resistance."

10) The Arab-Palestinian indoctrination of children with Jew hatred.

11) Human rights violations against women, children, and Gay people in the Muslim Middle East.

12) The fact that violent Jihadis call themselves "Jihadis" and claim to love death above life.

This is only a partial list, so please let us know the many more that we are missing.

Quote of the Whenever:

It is not that most progressives are anti-Semitic. They aren't. It's that they don't get it, they don't care, and they very much want you to shut the fuck up. - Michael Lumish